Drifting Easy By Sue Foster

“There’s no decent place to tautog fish in Ocean City! Is there?

With Delaware having a spring closed season extending from May 12th through 
June 30th, there will be some heavy pressure in Ocean City from serious 
tautog anglers.  Though Ocean city does not have the wide-open space of 
Indian River Inlet, it has its little “nooks and crannies” where an angler 
can drop in a line and catch some tautog.

Tautog is a member of the wrasse family. It lives near the bottom in any 
kind of structure. They like rocks, wrecks, boulders, mussel and oyster 
beds, bridge pilings, dock pilings, riprap, cement slabs, and fast running 
current. We catch them in the United States from Massachusetts to South 
Carolina. Up north, anglers call them “blackfish.”  Tautog range in color 
from dark green to black with larger male tautog having a white chin and a 
protruding forehead.

Tautog are very slow growing. Though tautog have been caught up to 22 
pounds, the average fish of 2 to 4 pounds are 6 to 10 years old!  The male 
tautog grow faster and live longer than the female. They can live up to 35 
years!  Females can be sexually mature at 12-inches and produce 30,000 eggs. 
Many good tautog anglers like to release the females and only keep males.

Female tautog tend to be a duller more blotchy brown color while males are 
more gray or black. During spawning season in the spring, females can 
obviously be full of eggs. Adult males often have a white chin and have a 
single small white spot on their mid-side.

Tautog are daytime feeders. Their feeding peaks at dawn and dusk, so the 
early riser certainly “does” get the worm!  Combine this with a good tide, 
two hours either side of slack low or slack high tide, and one can get their 
limit in a hurry!  At night they rest. It is very unusual to catch a tautog 
at night. Occasionally someone will accidentally snag one.  Fishing dawn and 
dusk will also give the angler the advantage of “less crowded” fishing 
conditions.  Most vacationers tend to fish in the 9-5-type time frame while 
they are fitting other activities (like dinner) into their family schedules!

Tautog are hard fighters and lots of fun to catch. Even if you are releasing 
your tautog, the “grouper-like” pull of the tautog is awesome!  Since the 
fish are right down in the rocks or bottom debris, one needs a rod with some 
“backbone” and a reel spooled with at least 20-pound test. If you’re fishing 
with light tackle and 10-pound test, you may have fun catching the smaller 
ones, but you are unlikely to actually get a “keeper” up unless you are 
fishing with some kind of Spectra “thin diameter line.”   I like to spool my 
reel with Power-Pro 50# test line and tie in a monofilament leader out of 
40-pound test with a uni-knot to tie two lines together.  If you just don’t 
know how to do that, use a barrel swivel.

A simple rig is to tie a loop with an overhand surgeon’s knot at the very 
end of your line and slip in a one to five ounce flat, inline, or bank 
sinker.  Go up a couple inches and tie another overhand surgeon’s knot a 
couple inches long and slip in a single loose hook. A short shank Octopus 
hook in the #2/0 range is popular in our area. Most anglers like to use 
black.

There are plenty rigs out there already tied up as well, but the rig is so 
simple to make you will save yourself a few bucks making them yourself.

Flip your rig out into the water. Not too far…. Not too close…. This is 
where trial and error and a little frustration comes in.  Feel the sinker 
fall in a hole, reel in all slack, and then wait. If you keep moving your 
sinker here and there you’ll get hung in a snag. If the tide takes it too 
quickly, you threw out too far.  If you get hung up in structure right off 
the bat, you threw in too close. Once you’re in a good spot, keep it still!

Once you feel a bite, let the fish tap it once or twice, lower the rod tip 
down, and then raise it up and set the hook!  Get it up quick or it will get 
hung in a snag.

“I can feel the fish on, but the dang gone sinker is stuck in a rock or 
something!!!!!”

That’s where I like the rubber band trick. Loop a heavy-duty rubber band in 
the sinker loop and attach the sinker to the rubber band. If you get a nice 
fish on, and the sinker gets caught in the rocks, you can break the rubber 
band and get the fish! (Some anglers also tie the sinker on with lighter 
monofilament, something like 8 or 10 pound test that will break easily.)

The bait?

For tautog, you got to use some sort of crustacean or clam or you won’t 
catch them!
The two baits you can buy from tackle stores are green crabs and sand fleas 
(sand crabs).  Green crabs aren’t natural to our waters, so be sure NOT to 
release them into the water. Small ones can be used whole. Larger one are 
broken in half. Pull off the shell, and cut them with a sharp pair of 
scissors. Some people use the legs, while other cut them off. Shove the hook 
in a leg socket.

Sand crabs, those little crabs you dig on the beach are easy to use. Just 
hook them thru the apron and out the outer shell with the hook protruding an 
eighth of an inch. Or just hook them through the tail end.

You can turn over rocks and find marsh crabs, or run up and down a marsh and 
grab fiddler crabs. You can smack open clams. You can buy live blue crabs in 
the market. Some people like to use the Berkley Gulp sand crabs or the Clam 
Fishbites.  I like the real thing!

The places?

The Ocean City Inlet is always good. The biggest ones come from the very 
end, but it’s hard to fish and you need a long rod. All along the rocks and 
cement wall one can find tautog.  Anglers fish the very end of the Oceanic 
Pier and cast towards the rocks and catch some really nice ones.  There’s a 
public bulkhead that runs all the way from 2nd to 4th Streets on the 
bayside. This is very good with either end being the best.  Then, to top it 
off, anglers fish the end of 1st Street, 5th Street, and 6th Streets.  These 
areas get crowded, so go early or dusk. 9th Street Pier sees some, but it is 
not the best place to go.  The Route 50 Bridge is a really “hot” place to 
tautog fish. The closer to the pilings near the draw of the Bridge is best, 
but anglers can actually catch tautog all up and down the bridge in the 
deeper holes.

If you have a boat, you can cast at the rocks around the South Jetty. There 
are some awesome catches of tautog there.  Offshore, on any of the 
artificial reef sites where there is structure, there are tautog! I’ve even 
seen tautog come out of the very deep hole next to the marsh in the 
Thorofare.

Tautog are really good to eat, but not the easiest to clean. They have no 
scales but have a tough hide. Chill the fish first as it makes them easier 
to clean. The meat stays whiter too if you clean a fish after it’s expired. 
Fillet and then skin the fillet. It is a very white, firm piece of meat.

Because of illegal marketing of undersized live tautog, DNR officials 
regularly check your tautog to make sure they are of the legal size limit. 
Several of my customers have gotten $100 tickets because they did not 
measure them correctly.  Lay the fish on top of the ruler.  Do not try to 
measure a fish by laying the ruler on top of the fish. It can be off by ½ an 
inch. And that’s all it takes to get a ticket!

Good fishing….







 

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